My Approach to User-Centered Design: Customer Journey Maps

May 25, 2018

Research Phase
Interview colleagues and stakeholders on the project to be sure we are meeting business requirements, but narrowing them at the same time. And include others in the design process. This helps me to integrate them into the team’s efforts and begin forming a corporate culture that prioritizes UX.

Design Tools: Customer Journey Maps

During the creation customer journey maps my team is trying to answer the “What ifs”. It’s an illustration or a diagram of all the touch points that our customers come into contact with the company online or off.

1. Narrowing: I review the goals for services and products from business requirements and stakeholders to clarify and narrow them when possible. Big goals can be broken down into smaller goals with big plans for the future. Narrowing the scope speeds up development time and saves money. I advocate for really doing it well at each stage for one goal and then use iterations. The Agile process works great to refine and broaden the scope later.

We should understand where it goes next, but for now narrow the focus and go with it. Narrowing the scope, while keeping the bigger ideas in mind, will actually speed up the process of getting there with less mistakes, less time reiterating for poor research, etc. This will also help us begin the process of creating artifacts like wireframes, personas and focus user testing.

Example: Google was just for search, ranking number 12 in the search engine race, now they dominate. Amazon sold new books, now look at them. Twitter was used to share posts on a screen from a messaging app. That’s where the character count comes from.

2.Gather user research: a semi-structured interview method to obtain information about the context of use, where users are first asked a set of standard questions and then observed and questioned while they work. Other methods include surveys, analytics, focus groups and more.3. Generate a list of touch points and channels to be placed in the journey map – Example: Pay a bill (touch point) channels would be pay online. pay in person. pay by mail. Channels are where the interactions take place.4. Empathy maps: help define facets of a persona – the user’s emotional experience – relying on psychology. Empathy maps helps establish a target audience. I use empathy maps to collaborate with teams and gain a deeper insight into their customers. Much like a user persona, an empathy map can represent a group of users, such as a customer segment. Like moms between forty and fifty in California… Narrwoing helps to target users when creating personas. This will guide your testing and provides early insight into acquisition strategies for marketing. The empathy map was originally created by Dave Gray and has been gaining popularity with the agile community. Tools: yougov.com

5. Use lenses and storyboards for brainstorming sessions: The team will view mindsets through different perspectives and change the scenario to see it from different points of view.
I prefer to create storyboards as a tool that visually explores a user’s experience with a product. It presents a product very much like a movie in terms of how people will use it. It can help UX designers understand the flow of people’s interaction with a product over time, giving the designers a clear sense of what’s really important for users. Storyboarding relies heavily on an iterative approach. Designers can be shot down, move on and come up with a new solution relatively quickly. Nobody gets too attached to the ideas generated because the ideas are so quick and rough.

6. Affinity Diagrams: The team will analyze feedback and findings from up-front research. Within these diagrams, we begin to make connections and identify the experience gaps that allows us to start sketching the journey. We begin to gather large amounts of language data (ideas, opinions, issues from brainstorming sessions), the user-centered data and organize them into groupings based on their natural relationships.

7. Sketch a customer journey or whiteboard the process

8. Refine and digitize, I like to begin wireframing and UI collaboration at this point

9. Get as much feedback as possible share with other teams.

Example: GDN job bank, we created a step process which increased successful job posting , improving session scores by 30%. The page length was slowing users in mobile and just being ignored. Bounce rates went down as well, by presenting a three step process up front allowed users to anticipate the other steps to come and prepare mentally for a process. This help establish up front that the process will be simple. We cut down 20 steps – counting all field entries and options, but narrowed and consolidated into a manageable step process. Although the steps were all there, by breaking them into chunks helped users to commit to the process.

Ask Kate: virtual customer-service representative

AT&T example: Designing website interfaces that could reduce call center volume at AT&T. Interviews with call center teams helped us determine what issues were most common for AT&T BusinessDirect Premier customers. “What were people calling in for?” We wanted to anticipate as many requests as possible that could then be answered on the website or, if necessary, be directed to the phone center. We did not want customers to simply call in because the resources online were to difficult to find or were not complete enough. Lack of trust in the answers given online would generated a call, even after the customer had found the answer, but they just weren’t sure and needed that personal confirmation.

So, we implement a virtual customer-service representative “chatbot” that could interpret the thousands of different kind of questions and direct them to accurate web resources. Customers visiting the AT&T BusinessDirect Premier website were able to click on “Ask Kate” and open a chat window and enter their question, just as though they were chatting with an agent. The UX team worked with the developers of Kate, NEXT IT, so that she had the ability to understand the intent of phrases and the context in which questions are asked, guiding customers to information and offers relevant to them. She’s even able to navigate users to the most helpful web pages and provide additional links to related information. The technology behind Kate provides a conversational interface that goes beyond the traditional natural language processing employed by most avatars and virtual agents.

With training, online help, globally integrated field support, extended call center hours- including weekends, online chat and now a virtual agent, users have flexibility in choosing which support option best suits their needs.

Researching these types of challenges with account management interfaces, interviewing people from the call center and reviewing surveys, helped AT&T build trust and rapport with users and reduce calls to the help desk. And, our online survey scores began to climb.

Leading Innovation Series
By John Holt, UX Designer, Intimiste Creative Group

The Allegory of the Cave, or Plato’s Cave, was presented by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work Republic.

This allegory can be used to compare the effect of not looking deeper into the UX process. UX designers must have a philosophy that goes beyond user testing – a point of view that can evolve with product iterations. Since users are often not aware of the inner-workings of their motivation, UX designers must understand psychology, visual design and motivation. Without a core user-centered philosophy – one only sees the “shadows” and not the reality “motivation” behind designing technology landscapes:

“Plato has Socrates describe a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them, and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners’ reality. Socrates explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not reality at all, for he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the manufactured reality that is the shadows seen by the prisoners. The inmates of this place do not even desire to leave their prison, for they know no better life. The prisoners manage to break their bonds one day, and discover that their reality was not what they thought it was. They discovered the sun, which Plato uses as an analogy for the fire that man cannot see behind. Like the fire that cast light on the walls of the cave, the human condition is forever bound to the impressions that are received through the senses.” Wikipedia

We are here to enlighten and build trust!

Great design reaches the deepest part of what makes us human. It communicates with feelings on an intuitive emotional level of consciousness. Impactful, unforgettable design has much more power to persuade than lists of features and benefits. Of course, there are those who only care about the facts, but even the most logical thinkers are inspired by quality design that conveys a deeper meaning. In other words, we care enough about our product and believe enough in its value to make the effort to enlighten you on intellectual and sensory levels. Trust is really about telling the whole story. Present the facts, design the feelings.

Consequently, customers “feel like” you not only have the goods, but you can deliver a satisfactory product experience. Often the product succeeds because of the emotional satisfaction it affords the user or buyer that a good choice is being made. Communicating that upfront with great visual design is like a promise that customers can get behind. They will be more likely to click-through, learn more and purchase.

User Experience Revolution (Smashing eBooks)Kindle Edition

Do you feel like the only person at your company who understands what a huge competitive advantage a good user experience provides? Are you frustrated that your management team doesn’t see the value of creating great user experiences? Do you struggle to convince colleagues to approach projects from a users perspective?

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This eBook is for anybody passionate about user experience, but who is in a company that needs an extra push. You might be a designer, marketer, content specialist or any one of many jobs concerned about user experience. You don’t need to be a manager, although you might be. You don’t need to be an expert in user experience. You just need a willingness to challenge the way your company does things and be relentless at putting the user first.